1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to a sheet feeder that includes a storable bypass member and a pickup roller to feed a sheet for receiving an image thereon, and an image forming apparatus incorporating the sheet feeder.
2. Related Art
Known image forming apparatuses include a sheet feeder that includes an openably storable manual bypass and a pickup roller, so that a recording medium such as a sheet is fed by the manual bypass and the pickup roller to a sheet feeding portion.
However, if a sheet conveying direction and a roller protruding direction of the pickup roller are same as a direction of a machine width of an image forming apparatus, the manual bypass is arranged to be stored out of space for storing the pickup roller in the direction of the machine width. Therefore, a sheet conveying path, the pickup roller, a feed roller and the like are disposed out of a body of the image forming apparatus, which increases the size of the image forming apparatus.
Japanese Patent No. JP-3328486-B (Japanese Patent Application Publication No. JP-H08-259050-A) discloses that a sheet standby position is varied by linking movement of open/close of the manual bypass, such that the pickup roller is used for both the manual bypass and a lower sheet container. However, the manual bypass is still stored outside the space for the pickup roller in the machine width. Therefore, the width of the image forming apparatus remains wide by the place to store the manual bypass.